


what are you doing the rest of your life?

by QuidProCrow



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Multi, Music, a lot of references to cake and ice cream, three people in love being outrageously precious, very little angst and no one dies!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-11-28 19:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11424804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuidProCrow/pseuds/QuidProCrow
Summary: Bertrand tries to find the song of the summer; Beatrice finds out she doesn’t have any ice cream; Lemony finds out they’d all be pretty lost without each other.





	what are you doing the rest of your life?

It was summer, which meant Beatrice had the windows in her apartment open wide and bought fresh fruit every single morning, so the whole place smelled like strawberries. It also meant that Bertrand was once again on his one-man quest to find the quintessential Frank Sinatra song that defined this particular summer. Beatrice, however, kept insisting that another artist was a better fit, which is why the moment Bertrand sat down with the records, she’d picked up one of the Tito Puente ones and put it on.

“You’re a cruel, cruel woman,” Bertrand had said, “insulting my music tastes.” 

Beatrice had just winked at him and walked off into the kitchen. 

I sat at Beatrice’s desk and watched Bertrand. I meant to start opening the mail, but watching Bertrand sit on the floor in the soft afternoon sunlight and pour over his and Beatrice’s records was a good deal more entertaining. I was reasonably sure he had a method he was using to sort them, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. “What was it last summer?” I asked. 

“You remember perfectly well what it was last summer,” Bertrand said, grinning as he put the records into piles. “You picked it, after all.”

It was true. I did remember perfectly well. Last summer had been particularly lovely and particularly stressful. _Summer Wind_ was a good fit for most of it. 

“I still say it should’ve been _Wave_ ,” Bertrand said. “It’s much more optimistic.” 

I hummed _Wave_ while I started on the mail, so that the grin stayed on Bertrand’s face. There was a letter from the Duchess of Winnipeg, bemoaning the fact that her latest assignment was very boring without us, and that she was looking forward to when she came back to the city. There was a single photograph of a building from my brother, and I recognized it as the library. Tomorrow’s date was scrawled across the back. It was short notice, but I’d probably be able to meet him there. I wondered what he’d say, if it was a personal call or something for the organization. I certainly wasn’t ready for the latter. The more time passed, the less ready I felt for a number of things. 

“You’re doing it again,” Bertrand said. He wasn’t even looking at me, instead studying the latest record he’d picked up. 

“No I’m not,” I said quickly. 

“You are. We said we weren’t going to talk about work today,” Bertrand said, his voice gentle, “so don’t think about work, Lemony.” 

We had said something like that, but it had been very early in the morning and the three of us had been in bed, so I hadn’t been paying much attention when Beatrice mumbled it into her pillow. But she was right, and Bertrand was right, and I was probably alright. 

“We’ll go with you, anyway,” Bertrand said, and then he looked at me with a great fondness in his expression that I was close to convincing myself that I deserved. 

I slid the mail into the desk drawer. 

Bertrand cast a quick glance in the direction of the kitchen, where Beatrice had been for the past hour, decorating a cake with the precision only she could manage, and then stood up and placed a hand on the record player.

I raised an eyebrow. “She may just kill you, Bertrand,” I said.

“I will take that chance,” Bertrand said. He lifted the needle, removed the record, and slid it back into its case. “Remember me fondly,” he continued, pressing a quick kiss to the top of my head. 

A year had gone by and I still wasn’t used to how free Bertrand was with his affection. My mouth did something that seasoned experts would call a bashful smile. “I’ll do my best.” 

“Bertrand,” Beatrice immediately called from the kitchen, because she had a sixth sense for when someone touched her record player, and the sudden silence was a dead giveaway, “you’d better have a damn good reason for turning off the love of my life.”

“You have a third love of your life?” I asked.

“Please,” Beatrice said, striding into the living room and carrying the cake, her purple sundress swishing at her ankles. “We’re all aware that Tito Puente is my one and only. You two are just poor substitutes.” 

I grinned, because after all this time I knew when she was kidding. Beatrice’s razor-sharp wit, and the touches of playfulness behind it, was one of my favorite things about her. “Do poor substitutes get cake?”

“I want ice cream with mine,” Bertrand said absently, fitting another record into the player. 

Beatrice paused as she set the cake down on the coffee table. “Do we have any ice cream?” she asked to the opening notes of _Come Fly With Me_. 

“Is there a reason we wouldn’t have any ice cream?” I asked. 

“ _Is_ there a reason?” Bertrand said, frowning down at the record player, his hand on his chin as he tried to listen to us and the song at the same time. “You know, I don’t think we should pick this one until we’re married. It’s sort of a victory song, isn’t it? And it clearly mentions honeymoons—”

Beatrice and I blinked and looked each other, both of us a very spectacular shade of red. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask me if he was being serious or just facetious, even though Bertrand had never been known to be facetious. I shrugged, not quite sure what to tell her, because I was only marginally sure that he was being serious myself. 

“What I mean,” Beatrice said, smiling at me the kind of smile that doesn’t go away once you’ve started, “is that I think we might have eaten it all.”

Bertrand gasped. “I am deeply disappointed,” he said, not looking disappointed at all, or showing any recognition of what had just happened, “and to show my disappointment, I’ll have to leave and have my own musical love affair.” 

“Well,” I said, “if we had heavy cream, whole milk, vanilla extract, salt, sugar, and if we were willing to wait, we could make it ourselves.” 

“I am willing to wait for the promise of ice cream made by Lemony Snicket,” Bertrand said. “It’s the only thing keeping me in this apartment, beyond the fact that Frank Sinatra is dead and it would be a very boring relationship.” 

Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Lemony, let’s leave Bertrand to the memory of his other man,” she said, and she linked her arm with mine and pulled me towards the kitchen. 

“Look, they didn’t call him ol’ blue eyes for nothing!” Bertrand called after us, carefully removing the record.

I stood beside Beatrice in the kitchen and pulled down what she couldn’t reach, because otherwise she would insist that climbing on top of countertops was reasonable even though it had already resulted in four injuries on two separate occasions. “Would you do it?” I asked, setting the sugar on the counter. 

“Do what?” 

I swallowed. “Marry us.” 

Beatrice turned slowly. She looked at me, something very soft in her eyes, a sort of disbelieving hope. She looked like that a lot lately, especially when we were all together and she thought I wasn’t looking at her, and I didn’t know whether or not I liked it. I tried to reassure her. 

“That is,” I went on, “I think there would be a reasonable amount of logistics we’d need to work out, but Bertrand and I have been thinking about it and we figured it shouldn’t be all that difficult, although there is a certain amount of difficulty presented in all things, but I feel as if trying to sort through them would be fairly advantageous and worthwhile this time, and—” 

But she took my hand and kissed me sweetly. She tasted like the strawberries I knew she’d been eating instead of putting them all on the cake, and I closed my eyes and held her close. When Beatrice pulled back, she rested her forehead against mine. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I would.”

“That,” I said quietly, “is very nice to know. Especially because we were considering a fairly lavish proposal.”

The corner of her mouth curled up. “How many musical numbers?”

“Oh, at least three,” I said. Which wasn’t entirely true, because Bertrand and I had only planned two, but I considered our abilities to put together another one and decided it was probably feasible. 

We mixed the ice cream and placed it in the freezer. While we waited for it to freeze, Beatrice put the cake back in the fridge and I took the two of them out to dinner at an Italian restaurant, where we sat at a small table outside by the river, where the warm breeze ruffled Bertrand’s hair to the extent that I gave him my hat to wear.

“A noble sacrifice,” Bertrand said, putting it on his head. “They’ll write ballads about you, Lemony Snicket.”

“Sonnets,” I said. “Beatrice will write sonnets.”

“Don’t bother me,” Beatrice said, and she dug around in her purse for a pen with one hand and straightened out a napkin with the other. “I’m already composing in my head.” 

Bertrand frowned, and then pulled a pen out of the ribbon of my hat and handed it to her. 

“What teamwork,” Beatrice said, and she kissed both of us on the cheek. 

The meal was excellent. It involved a great deal of pasta and laughter, which was one of my favorite sort of meals, especially with the way the two of them laughed, Beatrice throwing her head back as she laughed and Bertrand’s amused chuckles. 

The three of us walked along the river afterwards, and I let Bertrand keep my hat, even though I was truly reluctant to go without wearing it for too long. But it was a slow afternoon in the city that was turning into a quiet evening, and there were barely any other people out and about. The chances of running into someone we didn’t want to run into were probably slimmer than I thought. 

I fell into step beside Bertrand. He laced his fingers with mine and we watched Beatrice race ahead of us like she usually did whenever she was outside, the wind pulling at her hair. 

“She said she’d say yes,” I told him. “If we asked.”

Bertrand cleared his throat. “If we asked what?” he said, but I knew he was very clearly stalling for time.

“If,” I said, “we asked her to stand beside us in a formal setting in very fancy clothes and say a series of words that most people understand to be a vow of commitment and affection while surrounded by a good number of associates and hopefully none of our enemies—”

“Alright, alright,” Bertrand said, laughing a little. He smiled down at the sidewalk. “I’m glad.” 

We were quiet for a while. Beatrice was still ahead of us, this time trying to tempt nearby pigeons closer to her, and only marginally succeeding. 

“Would you?” Bertrand asked. 

I swallowed. I wasn’t going to try to get out of it, because I had walked right into this one. “I—yes. Wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would,” Bertrand said, as if it was that easy. “I have no reservations about you two. But I know how you are, Lemony.” He smiled a little, that sad, worried smile that made me sad and worried in return. “I know you’ll run if we don’t hold on to you.” 

“I wouldn’t run,” I said. “And I will thank you not to point out my previous track record of doing just that, because they were all for relatively legitimate reasons.” I liked to think that I wouldn’t do it again, if the sort of situation arose where it was something I had to consider. I liked to think that marriage wasn’t one of those things, because it was something I genuinely wanted. But the uncertainties of the world sometimes made even that lovely thing seem so far out of my grasp that, if I was honest with myself, I had considered slipping away into the night so that I wouldn’t ruin anything else. It was an upsetting thing to think, but I had thought of it as much as I had thought about those musical numbers. 

Bertrand looked out over the water. “Do you think I’m not scared too, Lemony? About the things we do, the positions we put ourselves in, whether this assignment or the next one will be the one that takes one of you away from us?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not that much of a fool to think that my fears aren’t universal.” 

“Sometimes you act like you do,” Bertrand said quietly. “And I am under no delusion that our feelings for each other will fix any or all of our problems. But they can be a little easier to deal with that way, when you know you aren’t alone. You know that, don’t you?”

I wanted very much to believe that, but every time Beatrice or Bertrand said it, it never seemed to sink in the way it should. It is one thing to love someone, or multiple someones, to love them so much you often can’t think of anything else, but another thing to trust them and the things they say and yourself, especially when you live the kind of lives that we lived. Perhaps I did forget about it sometimes, the terrible recklessness with which Beatrice occasionally acted, how Bertrand tended to be much too quiet at times, the things all of us did when we forgot we weren’t alone. The three of us were not perfect people, not by any means, but three imperfect people doing what they can for each other in a turbulent world is sometimes better than three perfect people going through life without a care about anything else. 

I squeezed Bertrand’s hand and didn’t say anything more. 

By the time we returned to Beatrice’s apartment, the ice cream had solidified into something manageable, and the three of us sat down on the couch with the cake, which Beatrice had still covered with a good deal of strawberries, and our homemade ice cream, which Bertrand ate first. 

“Was it worth it, Bertrand?” Beatrice asked.

“Very worth it,” Bertrand grinned. “Entirely worth it.”

If I had to pick one thing about Bertrand that I liked the most—and it would be difficult, considering there were a great number of things I liked about him—I would still probably settle on how, even though he could jest just as good as Beatrice, there was a great sincerity in almost everything he said. It was easy to want to believe him. It was easy to believe him. 

“To have two people such as yourselves to face the oncoming adversity of the world with is a great relief that I don’t think I have ever fully appreciated until this moment,” I said. “And if I could spend the rest of my life with anyone, I would sincerely want it to be the two of you.”

They didn’t look surprised, and they didn’t say anything. Sometimes you get to a point with other people where you don’t have to say anything more, where everything else is just immediately and silently understood, and all the rest doesn’t matter. Beatrice took one of my hands, and Bertrand took the other, and we sat there with the fading sunset on our shoulders, and then went back to eating our cake with a little bit of difficulty given that we were reluctant to let go of each other. 

Suddenly, Bertrand’s eyes went wide. “That’s it!” he exclaimed, and he scrambled to his feet, almost dropping his plate in the process.

“Hey, hey!” Beatrice said, snatching the plate from him. “Don’t be like that with the good plates.” 

Bertrand rushed over to the record player. He pulled out one of the records from the piles still on the floor and put it in the player, then carefully placed the needle over it. He sat back down beside us, looking pleased with himself as the song started. 

_I want to see your face in every kind of light_  
_in fields of dawn and forests of the night_  
_and when you stand before the candles on a cake_  
_oh, let me be the one to hear the silent wish you make—_  
_what are you doing the rest of your life?_

I liked it a great deal more than _Summer Wind_ or _Wave_. Even Beatrice seemed to enjoy the song, her head on my shoulder. Bertrand looked happier than anyone had any right to be, and I didn’t say anything about it, because that was how I felt, too. 

“What are we doing the rest of our lives, boys?” Beatrice asked, her voice just above a whisper when the song ended. 

“Staying right here,” I said into her hair. 

“On this couch,” Bertrand added. 

“Hm,” Beatrice said, frowning a little as she looked around the apartment. “But, you know, it might be a little too small when we have children.”

**Author's Note:**

> how many homemade ice cream recipes did I look up while trying to write this???? too many. and how many did I try???? zero, dammit. 
> 
> also – [summer wind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8cBIbxDaY), [wave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIrNtAq-t8w), [come fly with me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQq6yLe2ww), and [what are you doing the rest of your life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYyTpF0eaXQ)
> 
> anyway! I have been trying to write a pretty long and very complicated fanfic with these three for the past month, but plot shenanigans have made it very difficult along with my real inability to write straight-up romance. writing is hard, cats. so I was like, ‘screw that!’ and decided I would write a non-angsty smaller fanfic to try and figure out how people even write romance. and honestly i’m still not sure.
> 
> come talk to me about these precious nerds on my [tumblr](http://whoslaurapalmer.tumblr.com/)


End file.
